Are Polestar and Volvo the same?

Polestar was a name originally given to a Swedish racing team which was first coined as Cyan Racing team by Jan “Flash” Nilsson back in 1996 before the team was bought by Christian Dahl who later renamed the team into Polestar back in 2005.

10 years later Volvo has announced that they have bought Polestar for it to be an in-house tuning brand in the same way Mercedes bought AMG. This means that originally Polestar was to Volvo what AMG is to Mercedes, but all of this changed a year later when Polestar became a separate company focused on making luxury EVs.

Volvo is currently owned by Geely, a Chinese mega-company that sold more than 2 million cars last year which bought 50% shares in Polestar while the remaining 50% is owned by Volvo. This means that Polestar is now a separate company aiming to break free from Volvo in the coming years in order to create its own separate brand image.

Even though Polestar and Volvo do share lots of parts with each other, all Polestar models are designed on separate platforms. This also means that Volvo will continue making their electric cars which could potentially even compete with Polestar cars.

Volvo – The company

Volvo is a Swedish multinational company headquartered in Gothenburg Sweden. Volvo as a company offers both consumer cars, luxury cars, commercial vehicles, and even all sorts of marine and industrial systems and financial services associated with their original market intentions.

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Volvo was bought by Geely back in 2010 but the original company dates back to the early 1900s when they were known for ball bearing production. Nowadays Volvo is tasked with increasing its presence both in the luxury car segment and the commercial car segment.

Volvo is one of the largest suppliers of heavy-duty trucks and buses which means that this is a large portion of what Volvo does. However, as far as cars are concerned Volvo aims to become a full-on competitor with well-established German premium executive brands such as Audi, BMW, and Mercedes.

Volvo SUVs are currently one of the most desirable SUVs on the market, especially the XC90, XC60, and XC40. Volvo also offers competitive sedans such as the S60 and the S90 and lots of desirable and quality-made estates such as the V60.

Polestar – The new company

Ever since Tesla came out with its electric cars, the entire automotive world decided to follow with their variants of the electric car. Because the interest in electric cars is growing rapidly in recent years and is showing no signs of slowing down, many other brands are resurfacing with their own EVs, and many new EV brands like Polestar, Lucid, and Rivian are being born.

Volvo and Geely decided that it would be best to create a separate luxury EV brand which only focuses on designing luxury EVs. This enables Polestar to create a more focused, sustainable brand image, especially when you consider that Volvo is known for making diesel trucks and busses.

As such, Polestar came to the market in 2017 with the Polestar 1 which was later followed by the release of the Polestar 2 in 2020. Polestar aims to increase its market presence 5-fold by the end of 2025 by releasing at least 3 newer models.

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The Polestar 3 luxury electric sports SUV should see the light of day in 2022 while a larger SUV and a luxury sedan should follow soon. It’s safe to say that Polestar is shaping up to be a competitive EV company because they are solely focused on offering the best EVs.

The future of cars and decarbonized transport

With more than 54% of Americans willing to consider either a hybrid or an EV as their next car purchase, it seems obvious that we are at the begging of an eventual move towards more sustainable means of transport.

All of this enables companies such as Polestar to focus on designing EVs because they should be the most popular cars on the market in the future. Even though we can not predict as to when this is going to happen, it is highly unlikely that the rapid popularity growth of electric cars is going to slow down anytime soon.

Hybrids are also starting to encompass almost all newer models out there, but they are viewed as stepping stones between ICE cars and full-on EVs which means that the end goal is to completely eliminate fossil fuels and decarbonize transport to its fullest.

FAQ Section

 Should I buy the Polestar 2?

If you are interested in buying an EV as your next car you should check out the Polestar 2 because this competitive EV offers quite a bit of stuff for the money. Because it is pointed directly against the Tesla Model 3 the Polestar 2 should fare well as far as outright sales are concerned.

That being said, the current Polestar CEO said that they are not interested in becoming “Tesla Killers” because they want to create a stand-alone brand identity focused inward rather than outward.

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Should I buy the Polestar 1?

The Polestar 1 is an amazing-looking hybrid automobile made to showcase what Polestar can do. This means that this car is somewhat of a halo product only imagined to increase Polestar’s brand image. As such, you should consider buying the Polestar 1 if you really like the car.

Even though it does cost more than $150k and it is highly unlikely that you will be able to find a factory allocation slot, you should not lose all that much money because the Polestar 1 is allegedly already sold out even though the interest for brand new Polestar 1 models still exists.

Why does Volvo still design electric cars?

Volvo is a brand with a well-established brand image that is hardly going to change without completely restructuring the company and spending obscene amounts of money on marketing. This is why Polestar became a separate brand because they can coin their brand image from the ground up without making any adjustments.

As such, Polestar is intended to represent a different type of brand philosophy when compared to Volvo which should in theory make a reasonably sized distinction between upcoming Volvo and Polestar EVs.

Marko Mikulic

Why do you love writing about cars? I love writing about cars as cars are a huge personal interest of mine. I was raised in a car enthusiast community and ever since I was young, I always wanted to do car-related work.

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